The domestic balance of power: Relations between mistress and maid in nineteenth-century new England

Lasser, Carol

doi:10.1080/00236568700890011

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…The personalized and individual nature of these employment relationships encourages nannies to casually voice dissatisfaction with their positions. Since both parties are likely to be women, and the workplace is a private home or domestic sphere-a feminine-coded space in the United States, dating to Victorian era "angel in the home" constructions of domesticity-nannies express criticism of their working conditions in terms of their women employers' gendered failures (Lasser 1987). In my research, nannies exclusively leveled complaints at their female employers, even in cases where they knew their male employers as well, reflecting the persistence of the sexual division of home-based labor, encompassing paid as well as unpaid caregiving responsibilities (Orloff 1993).…”

Section: Isolated Workites and Gendered Judgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collective Complaint: Immigrant Women Caregivers’ Community, Performance, and the Limits of Labor Law in New York City

Glaser¹

2020

PoLAR

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In 2010 New York passed the first legal protections for in‐home care workers in the United States. Amid these legal changes, care workers deploy collective complaint as a community‐building strategy, allowing immigrant women who are domestic workers—often isolated in private homes—to commiserate with one another through shared criticisms of their, mostly women, employers. Based on fieldwork among activist nannies in New York between 2010 and 2012, I argue that collective complaint is a critical source of solidarity and community for childcare providers while caregivers’ rhetorical and affective strategies offer insight about the potential limitations of rights‐based legislation in this and other informal sectors.

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Section: Isolated Workites and Gendered Judgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collective Complaint: Immigrant Women Caregivers’ Community, Performance, and the Limits of Labor Law in New York City

Glaser¹

2020

PoLAR

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“…Attentive to this shift, scholars have highlighted how the sector's affective aspects extract surplus emotional labor from women workers (Hochschild ). Domestic workers, in turn, often justify or manage their caregiving labor through expressions of sentiment and kin obligation (Ally ; Colen , ; Hondagneu‐Sotelo ; Kleinman ; Lan ; Lasser ; Parreñas , ; Stacey ). Over the past few decades, ethnographies of paid household labor have demonstrated how discourses of intimacy, personalism, and fictive kin relationships inure women to degraded working conditions while obfuscating race‐based labor segmentation and ongoing discrimination (Chang ; Lan ; Nadasen ; Rollins ; Romero ).…”

Section: Domestic and Care Work Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“My Profession Chose Me:” Precarity, Pragmatism, and Professionalism in Caribbean and West African Immigrant Domestic Workers’ Narratives

Glaser¹

2017

J Anthropology North Am

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Extensive literature on care work or domestic work — childcare, eldercare, and housecleaning — in the United States and internationally has highlighted how the sector's affective aspects, e.g., intimacy, personalism, and fictive kin relationships, extract “surplus emotional labor” (Hochschild 1983) from women workers, who, in turn, often justify their caregiving labor through expressions of sentiment and kin obligation. In this article, I draw on three women's narrative framings of their domestic work jobs to argue that immigrant women in New York City emphasize structural, practical, and contextual elements of their domestic/caregiving labor, challenging constructions of care sector labor as evidence of innate caring aptitudes, womanly duty, or moral service. These characterizations have direct labor policy implications for paid care work — as evidenced in recent reforms. They also provide a theoretical basis for broader redistributive politics linking paid and unpaid caregiving labor.

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“…Research on the United States suggests that servants' earnings compared favorably with the earnings of other unskilled or semiskilled workers in the late nineteenth century, especially since room and board were provided; that any discontent among servants was not related to wage levels; and that even when servants' earnings were higher than earnings in other occupations, women shunned domestic service for noneconomic reasons (Katzman 1978: 303-14;Sutherland 1981: 109-10;Lasser 1987). For England, Teresa M. McBride (1976: 64) concludes that domestic service had a distinct monetary advantage over other occupations for women in the nineteenth century; that servants were doing comparatively well even in the early twentieth century; and that despite relatively good earnings, the long-term decline began after the peak in employment in 1891 (see also Schwarz 1999).…”

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confidence: 97%

The Transformation of the Canadian Domestic Servant, 1871-1931

Sager¹

2007

Social Science History

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This article uses the national sample of the 1901 census of Canada to compare the earnings of live-in domestic servants with the earnings of women in other occupations and to examine the ethnoreligious backgrounds of domestic servants. The hypothesis that domestic service offered relative material advantages, when room and board are taken into account, is rejected. The hypothesis that female domestic servants came from a narrow range of specific ethnoreligious backgrounds is also rejected. The changing backgrounds and expectations of female domestic servants in the early twentieth century exacerbated class tensions in the service sector, helping ensure that domestic service remained an occupation of short duration and high turnover. The conclusion is that domestic service did not simply decline; rather, a work process was transformed. Demographic changes combined with changes in family and individual strategies to limit the supply of labor. When efforts to increase labor supply failed, bourgeois employers attempted to replace labor with new household technology; the wage-paid occupation of the domestic servant declined and was replaced by that of the unpaid housewife.

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The domestic balance of power: Relations between mistress and maid in nineteenth-century new England

Cited by 8 publications

References 2 publications

Collective Complaint: Immigrant Women Caregivers’ Community, Performance, and the Limits of Labor Law in New York City

Collective Complaint: Immigrant Women Caregivers’ Community, Performance, and the Limits of Labor Law in New York City

“My Profession Chose Me:” Precarity, Pragmatism, and Professionalism in Caribbean and West African Immigrant Domestic Workers’ Narratives

The Transformation of the Canadian Domestic Servant, 1871-1931

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